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Private Faces in Public Places: Auden's The Orators

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Peter E. Firchow
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Abstract

Though at present it is critically unfashionable to view the early Auden as part of a literary group, during the thirties Auden and a number of his friends considered themselves intimately bound by personal, literary, and political ties. The notion of a group plays an extraordinarily important role in Auden’s early poetry. The underlying sociopolitical structure of The Orators is that of the group—much of its considerable obscurity is attributable to this fact and to the related circumstance that its primary audience was the Auden group. Two keys to understanding The Orators, namely its foundation on the psychological “theories” of Homer Lane and on the anthropological research of John Layard, were provided only years later by Auden’s friends, Isherwood and Spender. Moreover, its emphasis on groups has an important political significance which has often led to its being considered a quasi-Fascist work, not least by Auden himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , March 1977 , pp. 253 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 Quoted in Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 72.

2 Symons, The Thirties (London: Cresset, 1960), p. 16; Day Lewis, The Buried Day (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), pp. 216–17; Replogle, “The Auden Group,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 5 (1964), 135.

3 Orwell, A Collection of Essays (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), p. 237.

4 A Hope for Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1944), pp. 25, 37.

5 W. H. Auden, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber & Faber, 1937), p. 103. Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from Auden poems are taken from the first English editions.

6 Geoffrey Handley-Taylor and Timothy d'Arch-Smith, C. Day Lewis, The Poet Laureate: A Bibliography (Chicago: St. James Press, 1968), p. v; FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (Boston: Little, 1965), p. 225.

7 According to Edward Mendelson (to whom I wish to express my thanks for reading and commenting on this essay, as well as my apologies for not being able to deal with all of his criticisms in this context), it is C. Day Lewis who got the date wrong, not Auden, who did not visit Europe in 1947. This change of dates does not, I think, seriously affect the point I have been arguing; it merely shifts responsibility for the wrong date from Auden to Day Lewis. It may even strengthen my point. Since Day Lewis originated the claim that the three poets first met as a group after the war, his mistaking both date and (apparently) place makes the whole story seem even more suspicious. Carritt, “A Friend of the Family,” in W. H. Auden: A Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975).

8 “Education in the Twenties,” New Verse, 29 (March 1938), 19.

9 World within World (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), p. 139.

10 Roberts, Preface to New Country (London: Hogarth, 1933), p. 12; Lehmann, In My Own Time (Boston: Little, 1969), p. 115; MacNeice, Modern Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).

11 But in his book on the student revolts of 1968, The Year of the Young Rebels (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 142, Spender offers quite a different picture of his reactions to Communism in the thirties. “So if in 1930 one was twenty-one,” Spender (who was) writes, “Communism did not mean the Stalinism of the mid-Thirties at the time of the trials. It meant, in Berlin, where I was much of my time, the revolution as projected by Eisenstein and the other great directors of that time, and as written up by travelers to the Russian Revolution still in ferment.”

12 MacNeice, The Strings Are False (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), pp. 113–14; Bell, quoted in Communism and Britisli Intellectuals, p. 104; Auden, “As It Seemed to Us,” The New Yorker, 3 April 1965, p. 182.

13 Replogle, “Auden's Marxism,” PMLA, 80 (1965), 593; Hausermann, “Left-Wing Poetry: A Note,” English Studies, 21 (1939), 205.

14 Jarrell, “Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology,” Partisan Review, 12 (1945), 437; Spender, “Oxford to Communism,” New Verse, 26–27 (Nov. 1937), 9; Scarfe, W. H. Auden (Monaco: Lyrebird, 1949), p. 16; Foxall, “The Politics of W. H. Auden,” The Bookman, 85 (1934), 474.

15 Sparrow, Sense and Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1934), p. 153; Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 45; Hampshire, Modern Writers (London: Chatto & Win-dus, 1969), p. 22; Maxwell, Poets of the Thirties (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 158; Fuller, “Early Auden: An Allegory of Love,” The Review, 11–12 (1964), 90.

16 The Poems, ed. Daniel Jones (London: Dent, 1971), p. 84.

17 “Some Notes on Auden's Early Poetry,” New Verse, 26–27 (Nov. 1937), 4–5.

18 Spender, The Destructive Element (Philadelphia: Albert Saiper, 1953), p. 268; Rickword, “Auden and Politics,” New Verse, 26–27 (Nov. 1937), 21–22; Henderson, The Poet and Society (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1939), p. 205; Fraser, “The Young Prophet,” The New Statesman, 28 Jan. 1956, pp. 102; Auden, The Orators (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 7. Further references to The Orators, unless stated otherwise, are to this first English edition.

19 Rhodes, The Poet as Superman (London: Weiden-feld & Nicolson, 1959), pp. 157, 184.

20 Sellers, “New Light on Auden's The Orators,” PMLA, 82 (1967), 455; Isherwood, Exhumations (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 13, 23.

21 Mendelson, “The Coherence of Auden's The Orators,” ELH, 35 (1968), 117; Maxwell, Poets, p. 154.

22 The Old School (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 17.

23 According to Francis Scarfe (Auden, p. 11), Auden was an early opponent of Mosley, providing him with a “hot reception” at Oxford. Scarfe provides no date or evidence for this event, but if it did take place, the only logical time was while Auden was still living at Oxford as a student, in other words no later than 1928. But at this time Mosley was a respectable and promising left-wing member of the Labour Party and it is unlikely that Auden would have given such a person anything but a polite welcome. In fact, the only explicit references to Mosley in Auden's early work are either ambiguous or neutral. In the fourth ode of The Orators, the future Fascist dictator John Warner proposes to place various enemies in a zoo or else have them

ducked in a gletcher, as they ought to be,
With the Simonites, the Mosleyites and the I.L.P.

Here Mosley's party is classed with other offshoots of existing political parties and is by no means singled out as a special danger. And in “A Happy New Year” Auden very briefly mentions seeing “Mosley, the descendant of Pitt,” a remark that can hardly be interpreted as derogatory. Indeed, how little the Auden group objected to the policies of Mosley in 1931 is evident from Isherwood's willingness to write an article on “The Youth Movement in the New Germany” for Mosley's journal, Action. And possibly it is also significant to note that Mosley had been considerably assisted in his political career by an outstanding war record—as an airman.

How closely The Orators approximated the thinking of at least one Mosleyite is dramatically revealed in Harold Nicolson's novel Public Faces (1932), which draws its title—and epigraph—from Auden's dedicatory verses to Stephen Spender. Nicolson, to be sure, does not use the distinction of public and private in quite the same way Auden does. For him “private” seems to mean only personal (in a Forsterian sense), whereas with Auden it assumes the additional meaning of “private” in terms of group adherence and linguistic usage; and, on the other hand, “public” for Nicolson refers not only, as in Auden, to the world beyond the individual and his friends, but also and quite specifically to the State. Despite these differences, there are some striking resemblances, especially in terms of motifs and what it is perhaps not inappropriate to call obsessions. There is, for instance, the “enemy” who, in Nicolson's novel, grows to massive proportions, with the whole world leagued at one stage of the narrative against Britain. Britain, of course, as befits the Stalkyish nature of this scientific fiction, is easily a match for them all, especially in view of its possession of secretly developed and spectacularly speedy rocket airplanes, whose sudden appearance throws Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Baghdad into utter confusion; and in view also of Britain's imminent possession of “atomic bombs” as small as inkstands. The responsibility of Britain's glorious and chiefly diplomatic victory rests ultimately on the public impulsiveness of a paranoic Air Minister (the airman?) and on the private manipulations of two minor public officials, John and Jane, who happen to be in love with each other. After the crisis is over, we are granted a brief glimpse of the “Mosley Cabinet of 1942,” one of whose “many valuable achievements” is the suppression of the “syndicate of popular newspapers” on whom much of the crisis is blamed (Public Faces, New York: Popular Library, 1960, p. 284). One is immediately reminded of the Airman's vigorous denunciation, in The Orators, of Beethameer (Beaverbrook plus Rother-more) and Heathcliffe (Northcliffe). Public Faces closes with an appendix, composed in 1978 in a rather puerile “futurese” by “Leonid Nikolson,” Harold Nicolson's son (shades of John Warner). Here again private and public merge, almost in an Audenesque way.

There are other connections between Mosley and The Orators. Mosley's gifts as an orator, employed in Parliament as well as in the streets, were well known, as even relatively unsympathetic accounts of his career attest (e.g., L. C. B. Seaman, Life in Britain between the Wars, London: B. T. Batsford, 1970, p. 194). Like the Airman, Mosley was—and was known to be—a great practical joker, and Robert Skidelsky in his recent biography gives an account of the twenty-year-old Mosley playing a prank with a pseudocorpse that is reminiscent of the Airman's gruesome humor. Suggestively, Skidelsky also sees a “strong link between fascism and aviation with its ‘fascist’ combination of individual daring and futuristic technology.” See his Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, 1975), pp. 68, 320. How closely unrealistic works of art can approach actual life is strikingly—and tragically—illustrated by comparing The Orators with the Earl of Lytton's biography of his son Anthony, Viscount Knebworth. Knebworth, roughly Auden's contemporary at Oxford, and a conservative MP, took up flying in the late twenties, making trips especially to Italy, Austria, and Germany. By the early thirties his sympathies with Fascism and Roman Catholicism were growing and he engaged in a long—and rather fantastic—correspondence with a friend (both using pseudonyms) in which “they imagined themselves as engaged in a crusade against a certain tendency of modern thought exemplified in the works of Noel Coward and others, from the influence of which they desired to rescue their girl friends. They called this ‘The War’; they exchanged poems about it, and it was the chief topic of their correspondence during these months.” Knebworth died, at the age of twenty-nine, while practicing formation flying with his reserve squadron. See Anthony (London: Peter Davies, 1935), pp. 336, 339. There is a remote possibility Auden may have known of Knebworth through Layard's connections with Homer Lane's disciples and admirers, of whom the Earl of Lytton was one.

24 Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), p. 48.

25 Lions and Shadows, An Education in the Twenties (London: Methuen, 1953), pp. 299–312.

26 Bazeley, Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth (New York: Schocken, 1969); Wills, Homer Lane (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964).

27 Talks to Parents and Teachers, Insight into the Problems of Childhood (New York: Hermitage, 1949), p. 148.

28 Wills, “The Influence of Homer Lane,” Hibbert Journal, 64 (Oct. 1965-July 1966), 29.

29 Spiritual Discipline, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Pantheon, 1960), p. 454.

30 Stephen Spender in a conversation with the author, April 1975.

31 “X. E. Lawrence,” Now and Then, 47 (Spring 1934), rpt. in Then and Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 22.

32 Psychoanalytische Schriften zur Psychosomatik, ed. Gunter Clauser (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1966), p. 59.

33 James G. Southworth, “Wystan Hugh Auden,” Sewanee Review, 46 (April-June 1938), 189.

34 Kathleen and Frank (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 349.